I have four kids and so my DVD’s unfortunately aren’t in the most pristine shape. The DVD player in our family room usually plays DVD’s with minor scratches just fine, or if there’s a major scratch, it will temporarily freeze, but I can fast-forward through it.
However, the same DVD’s played through my computer (hooked up to a projector in a home media room) frequently freeze, with no way for me to fast-forward or otherwise get through the scratches. I end up having to eject the DVD and re-play it and choose the next chapter after the scratch. I use PowerDVD and Windows XP Media Center edition to play the DVD’s and they seem to have the same behavior in terms of when the DVD’s freeze, so I’m thinking it has something more to do with my DVD drive being less tolerant of scratches.
Any thoughts on what I can do to help the situation? I know about tricks of trying to clean the DVD’s but these are true scratches, not fingerprints or dirt. My main goal is to try and increase the scratch tolerance of my computer so that it’s similar to my DVD player.
I have the same problem. DVD player OK - PC DVD drives gets bellyache even with DVD disks in relatively good shape. I believe that the reading and on chip error correcting mechanisms in the DVD component units are simply more robust than the software implentations, but regardless of the source (and I’ve tried several top rated DVD software players) there is no way (I’ve found) to make the PC DVD “more tolerant”.
My first DVD player was purchsed some time ago. I found that it was very intollrant of Netflix disks, that tended to be pretty dirty and/or scratched. They’d reach a point and then just skip, freeze or jump around. If I took the DVD out and cleaned it, it usually would play OK.
I finally got sick of this and started an online search of players, and found some articles (sorry, forgot where) that pointed out some makes and models were much better at resisting that. I got a Sony which has never had a problem with any disk since.
So, I’m wondering if computer DVD drives may not also vary in their ability to resist scratches? Might be worth doing some online research.
Indeed they do vary. BenQ and LiteOn drives have very good reputations for these sort of issues, and I’ve also heard some very good things about the Asus E616A.
You might try a “DiscDr” device - it grinds off a very thin bit of plastic from the DVD, and generally renders the unplayable discs playable, but really ugly. Netflix would have a cow if you did it to their discs, though.
Something else you can use is Novus plastic polish. It’ll either smooth over or fill in scratches, and leave a slick surface that’s somewhat more resistant to getting scratched. The theory is that it’s so slick that casual bumps will just bounce off, rather than getting a chance to dig in and make a scratch.
A light hazing may respond well to just the #1 final polich, but deeper scratches will probably need the #2, followed by #1. Novus is available from places like Tap Plastic or Amazon.
Different makes (and indeed samples) of DVD players will have differing playability characteristics. Try not to scratch your DVDs, they really don’t like it, but if you do, then polishing out the scratch as in the post above can work well. A DVD has the recording layer sandwiched in the middle of the plastic layers, and so even the deeper scratches generally don’t damage the actual recording layer itself. If you can buff out the scratch in the plastic layer, you can access the undamaged data again.
CDs aren’t so robust, scratch-wise. The recording layer on a CD is on the topside of the disc, only protected by a thin layer of laquer, and is easily damaged by the smallest scratch on the label side. Scratches on the bottom layer can be polished out, but they tend not to cause as many readability problems as scratches on DVDs due to the greater size of the data marks on CDs.